NSA watchdog: Snowden should have come to me

The National Security Agency’s top watchdog slammed Edward Snowden on Tuesday for failing to follow official protocol in relaying his concerns about wayward intelligence gathering and also faulted Congress for not vetting the details of post-9/11 surveillance programs.

“Snowden could have come to me,” George Ellard, the NSA’s inspector general, said during a panel discussion hosted by the Georgetown University Law Center.

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Ellard, making his first public comments in seven years working for NSA, insisted that Snowden would have been given the same protections available to other employees who file approximately 1,000 complaints per year on the agency’s hotline system.

“We have surprising success in resolving the complaints that are brought to us,” he said.

In Snowden’s case, Ellard said a complaint would have prompted an independent assessment into the constitutionality of the law that allows for the bulk collection of Americans’ telephone metadata. But that review, he added, would have also shown the NSA was within the scope of the law.

“Perhaps it’s the case that we could have shown, we could have explained to Mr. Snowden his misperceptions, his lack of understanding of what we do,” Ellard said.

And if Snowden wasn’t satisfied, Ellard said the NSA would have then allowed him to speak to the House and Senate intelligence committees.

”Given the reaction, I think somewhat feigned, of some members of that committee, he’d have found a welcoming audience,” Ellard said in a reference to outspoken NSA critics on the panel, including Sens. Ron Wyden (D-Ore.) and Mark Udall (D-Colo.).

“Whether in the end he’d have been satisfied, I don’t know,” Ellard added. “But allowing people who have taken an oath to protect the constitution, to protect these national security interest, simply to violate or break that oath, is unacceptable.”

The NSA inspector general is the latest high-ranking U.S. national security official to publicly condemn Snowden, the former contractor granted asylum last summer by Russia after stealing what the NSA estimates are upwards of 1.5 million classified documents and leaking them to select journalists.

While also criticizing Snowden, President Barack Obama has said the disclosures have prompted a necessary debate between protecting national security and safeguarding their privacy. Ellard said he too welcomed that debate, but argued that Snowden’s moves were “the wrong way to do it” because the stolen documents also gave America’s enemies a blueprint for how the country tries to safeguard against terrorist attacks.

“The losses…were not the result of some wacko bureaucrat wanting to classify everything and anything,” he said. “If I were to be able to speak more specifically about these particular documents I think you’d agree with me [that] yes, there’s absolutely good reason that they should be classified at the highest levels.”

Ellard praised Congress for conducing extensive oversight — he has four staffers assigned over the next year to review the legality of several programs in response to a query from the Senate Judiciary Committee — but he also complained that lawmakers hadn’t done their homework either.

Here, he cited a recently declassified opinion from the federal court that oversees NSA programs where Judge Claire Eagan highlighted the role that lawmakers could have played in attending top-secret briefings on the bulk collection program.

”Now that should have led to some sort of discussion,” Ellard said. “The fact that it did not is certainly not the blame of the intelligence community.”

David Cole, a Georgetown law professor speaking on the same panel as Ellard, pushed back at the NSA official’s explanation that Snowden could have followed the official channels to raise his concerns. That review, he said, wouldn’t have gotten him anywhere and the public debate would never have started.

“I think it was appropriate in telling the American public and no one else had done it,” Cole said. “George [Ellard] hadn’t done it despite his independent constitutional reviews. The courts hadn’t done it despite their independent reviews. The executive branch hadn’t done it. Congress hadn’t done it. Somebody has to do it.

Cole said there’s no dispute that Snowden’s moves were illegal, but he added, “There couldn’t have been a debate without a leak.”